About

A reading edition of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. The poem sits at the centre; everything else — notes, scenes, sound, maps — is there to deepen slow reading, and can be turned down or off.

How to read

• Density. Clean shows the poem alone. Reader underlines phrases with essential notes. Scholar adds prosody, textual matters and cross-references.
• Notes open on hover, tap, or Enter on an underlined phrase. On wide screens they sit in the margin like glosses; on phones they rise in a sheet from the bottom. Each note says whether it records an established fact or offers an interpretive reading.
• Lines are numbered within each movement. Click a line number to copy a link to it; links look like /burnt-norton/1#12.
• Keyboard. Press ? for shortcuts. Single-key shortcuts can be switched off in the menu.
• Motion and sound. Scenes behind the text move slowly and can be turned off; with reduced motion set in your system they are replaced by still images. The soundscape is off until you turn it on.

The text, and why it is not here

Four Quartets is in copyright, and its text is not distributed with this site or its source code. You are looking at placeholder lines arranged in the shape of the sequence; the notes attach to where their phrases fall in the printed poem.

If you own a copy, you can import it locally: put a plain-text file for each quartet in content/text-private/, run npm run import-text, and the edition — notes, search, maps and scenes — will use your text. See RIGHTS.md and docs/TEXT-FORMAT.md in the repository.

Listen

Recordings are linked, never hosted.

• T. S. Eliot — Four Quartets, read by the poet (1947). Eliot recorded the whole sequence for HMV; the 78 rpm discs were issued in 1947 and later reissued on LP. His reading is measured, almost liturgical — a useful corrective to more theatrical performances. Open Culture (streams the recording) · Internet Archive (Angel Records LP, samples)
• Ralph Fiennes — T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets (film, directed by Sophie Fiennes) (2023). A film of Fiennes's one-man stage performance, which toured the UK and played at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London in 2021. Review in Variety
• Jeremy Irons — Four Quartets, read by Jeremy Irons . A reading by the actor, featured by the Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation

How it is made

A static site built with Astro. The scenes are drawn live with WebGL shaders (three.js); the maps and diagrams with d3; the sketches on the atlas cards with rough.js; the soundscape is synthesised with the Web Audio API. There are no photographs, no audio files and no tracking. Type is set in EB Garamond, Cormorant Garamond and Alegreya Sans.

Accessibility

The poem is plain, readable HTML before any script runs. Notes are accessible disclosures; line numbers are hidden from screen readers; every visualization has a text alternative; everything works from the keyboard. If something gets in your way, please say so.